Luke: [00:00:00] From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API.

Luke: Hey everybody. changing it up a little bit this week. I’m gonna do a solo podcast, so it’s great to be here with you guys. I, I think there’s a lot of. Interesting stuff we’re about past in the second quarter of 2025. there’s a lot of interesting things going on with the landscape on the tech side and with ai, with crypto with brave with a lot of the things we have going on.

Luke: And also there’s been some really interesting, Shakeups and change outs on the regulatory side and on the ability for, kind of entrepreneurs to kind of dig in. And so, we also have some cool updates about the podcast itself too. [00:01:00] So, I’m gonna dig in on a solo episode today.

Luke: So you’re listening to me on the Brave Technologist this week. Yeah. So why don’t we go a little bit into, May, 2025 January there were a series of executive orders that were done in the us by the new administration that really kind of reversed a lot of previous regulatory uncertainty around, ability for startups, especially both on the AI and the crypto side, but, but specifically on the crypto side to really dig in, experiment and try to find a product market fit. And, the environment, and this doesn’t mean to get political, but it is just kind of a reality. You’ve seen that with some of our guests that we’ve had on the podcast that have talked about it.

Luke: But, at, at Brave we’ve been a similar position, right? We, we launched our. Basic attention token in 2017 and been really all about playing by the rules and, keeping our noses clean and building functional product and, kind of introducing the benefits and the value of this to millions of users and new users and.

Luke: Et cetera. And it, it has been an environment that’s been really [00:02:00] difficult to operate in where you, you don’t know if you stray off of the script or dare to experiment what’s gonna happen if you’re gonna get, enforcement action. ‘cause they were the SEC was deploying a strategy that really had a chilling effect on the markets they were going after.

Luke: Big players, small players, players that had really legitimate use cases like library. Which I spoke with on here with several people about and then on the other end of the spectrum, you had them going after kinda celebrity related projects with NFTs and then with some of the Scammier projects too.

Luke: And the things are gonna be with new technology, you’re gonna have kind of. Pull from speculation and, and also from people trying to test the limits of where these things are. And what’s been really interesting about this year is it was about a week in January where a lot of that policy got reversed and you had different, not just on the administration side, but you’ve got, regulatory agency changes that have been very different.

Luke: Some folks might remember had uh, Hester purse on SEC Commissioner, that last year while the chairman Gensler was at the SEC, and, Hester went through some really great lengths of [00:03:00] explaining some of the difficulties that they’re dealing with and, and feeling some of the pain of entrepreneurs.

Luke: And, you know, they couldn’t even test with the, software that they’re supposed to regulate against. Et cetera. And what we’ve seen is now Hester’s actually leading the crypto task force at the SEC now and you’re really getting a course change in environment where you can actually experiment and find market fit.

Luke: And there’s also some, stable Coin Act and the Genius Act that are, are getting through Congress and some folks might remember Austin Campbell we interviewed last year, had on the show last year, he was, he was talking about stable coins then, but he’s actually working with both sides of Congress to help advise him on, what’s going on with the stable coins and, have being a meaningful voice to pull both sides together on that regulation.

Luke: And, and then on the other end of the spectrum too, you’ve got. Major banks in institutions that if, whether it’s, ETF products or stable coins are actually either putting assets on their sheets or, reintegrating products that they had previously abandoned. And so there’s a lot of, a lot of renewed interest in, the Web3 and crypto side.

Luke: And on the [00:04:00] AI side, similar too. Like you had, it wasn’t necessarily the degree of, Chilliness in the markets. But there was just an uncertainty and uh, we’re starting to see now where a lot of, a lot of competition, a lot of things that were. Uncertain have been or very volatile or are starting to get more and more shaped up and, products are starting to find their fit.

Luke: And the iteration has just been wild to see in, in the AI space. And we’ve seen people kind of theorizing, about the commodification of models and the specialization of models. And now you’re actually seeing that stuff hitting the road, which is, it’s awesome. I mean, and you’re seeing startups building with.

Luke: Open source you know, software with, APIs. And it, it’s been an area that’s been super interesting to see. Even on, Brave side we, brought the Brave Search engine to life several years ago. and folks that listened to the podcast with my colleague Jan Petrowski or with Joseph or with JP Schmitz where we kind of dug in on the search side a little bit more.

Luke: there’s, cases that you expect to see happen and take off and plan [00:05:00] around. And then there’s other ones that you adapt to. And the brave search, API is certainly a uh, case where we’ve adapted and initially we were kind of like, okay, well, I. Are these AI teams going to train their models with, with our data.

Luke: Then it was like, well actually they’re gonna start to just, pour it in web results into, their their chat bots and things like that. And then we’re seeing all sorts of other use cases kind of developing taking off. And it’s been a really quick fashion. So it’s really cool to see.

Luke: And when you start to see that, hey. The web starts to look very familiar if everyone’s just using Common Crawl or, or a couple of different data sources. What’s made our index really great is that it’s built from people that have opted in to help build it off of real things. And so, when you look about, garbage in, garbage out in a lot of these other scenarios, the cool thing, and this has been really neat to see, is just the fact that, if somebody wants to have a really clean base set of information.

Luke: you’re starting at the cleanest route with what we’ve been putting. So it’s been really cool to see that that part of the business grow. And, you know, if encourage anybody, if you’re working on AI [00:06:00] project and you’re looking for kind of web data web information, et cetera, give our, give our A PIA checkout. I’m not trying to shell it too hard, but it is pretty excellent and it’s not terribly well known. So the other thing that’s been really cool around search is we’ve, we put out our search our AI answer engine. Into the in brave search and watching that evolve.

Luke: we had Joseph on on the podcast earlier. He was talking about, first version of that where you just got a pretty simple text output. And then that’s evolved to become more and more dynamic and getting structured data answers and getting multiple sources and having those things rec cited and watching that piece grow and watching that piece get adoption has been really, really stellar to see, you know, we’re starting to see the point where we’re, Reaching almost over 14 billion annual queries a year through Brave Search. And it’s pretty phenomenal. I remember, back when, when I joined Brave pretty, pretty close to the beginning. in 2016 people were challenging whether people cared about privacy and uh, no one cares.

Luke: Everybody’s kind of posting, socials and, and all that. But, back then we’d say, Hey, I bet those people don’t want their dms to go [00:07:00] down in public. Or I bet those people have, window shades on their windows at home. and that was kind of the go-to what’s really been wonderful and amazing is we are close to breaking 85 million monthly active users in March.

Luke: And 14 billion. Annual brave search queries. these are not small numbers anymore. You’re seeing a movement now of people who, when given the option. To move to, private, a solution that’s user first that puts them in the driver’s seat cares about, their interests first.

Luke: when you have an option out there that that’s in the market versus an incumbent that, puts everybody else before you and shares uh, your information with all these different companies you’ve never heard of. 85 million monthly active users have moved with their feed to privacy, Whether they care about privacy or not or they care about the secondary effects or second order effects of, of having good privacy, whether that’s, uh, a cleaner web ui, a, lack of ads on, on streaming and YouTube and on all these benefits that get is takeaways, less data consumption, et [00:08:00] cetera.

Luke: These were theories, or small scale experiments. Like when we started at Brave 85 million monthly active users, we have a line of sight to a hundred million. It’s a beautiful thing to see that more and more and more people are moving with their feet. To user first and, privacy.

Luke: And if you’re listening to this and you’re a user of brave, I just really appreciate that, you’re, you’ve given us a shot. But also, I mean, this doesn’t happen without the users. Every, everybody, if you go onto X Reddit or community operate or wherever you’ll see it’s you’re not getting call centers or.

Luke: You’re not getting, faceless AI bots, you’re, whether it’s Brendan Ike, or CEO or Brian Bondy, or CTO and co-founder or myself or Samson or many other people on the team. We are out there, we’re talking to users and we aren’t just, saying it when we, we say we appreciate, that users give us their feedback.

Luke: We rely on it, we listen to it, it matters significantly. Without our [00:09:00] users, we are nothing. And so that user feedback is so amazing and we’re starting to see whole new groups of people just kind of moving over. Kind of back to the landscape. I mean, we’ve also seen some wild things this past several months where, Mozilla with Firefox’s changed their privacy policy.

Luke: Something to things, say things they never said they would say before. We’re seeing with, with Google not only did they deploy manifest E three, but people have, are, are seeing the impact of like, their favorite ad blockers or privacy tools being severely limited. or just fully, deprecated and, and no longer supported.

Luke: and people that never would’ve considered us before are now out there advocating for people to, make their home brave. And I really appreciate those folks too. we’re not just a skin Chrome. we, we hardened. The open source code base in our GitHub under Brave Browser and the Wiki, you could see deviations for chromium.

Luke: The team puts a lot of care into maintaining that list and really approaching us from the ground up. and, and too. Talk about people talking to users. I mean, you see, um. ryan Brown, who we’ve had on the show, out on, on [00:10:00] X every day. He like fixed in web compat things know, the rest of the team Han a a lot of the other team too, working on web compatibility and privacy and it, it’s pretty awesome.

Luke: But yeah, I think that the landscape continues to change. Browsers are maintaining their important searches. Important. There’s all these, like, Blue link business, buzzwords throwing around. But the fact of the matter is people love standard search especially when it’s minimal and it gets ’em what they need.

Luke: and we’re seeing really cool ways that AI is like helping to improve upon, the search result page in meaningful ways. And even with Leo we, we really used to bring your own model. Allowing developers and, and early adopters to kinda bring different models into Brave Leo and a bunch of work the team’s doing around, like, having the browser start to do genic things.

Luke: Things that, Brian Bondy, our, our co-founder CTO were was talking about when he was one of the first guests on, on the Brave Technologist some of those roadmap items that he was talking about how. You know, the browser level with ai could be a different type of an experience.

Luke: And you’re not just seeing that with us. I mean, there’s the Plexity folks are talking about making a browser now. [00:11:00] Lots of interest from, established AI companies into looking into getting into the browsing game. And the, the user agent has never been more important At the same time, it’s never been more important to really accent that it is the user’s agent and, we’re out here as a user first. Your user agent should be working for you. And so, um, yeah, I think Looking forward into 2025. I am really excited to see how things shape up.

Luke: We saw this and we talked about this on the podcast several times, but almost every Fortune 500 company has got some mandate around ai. And a lot of the great guests we’ve had on here have been talking about how that’s been impacting their business and how they’ve been adapting. I mean, having everybody from Nordstrom’s talking about like how AI has disrupted like a hundred plus year old supply chains and, processes and business models, then is adapting and iterating there to eBay a more new current example to PayPal, right? Like, it’s across the board.

Luke: And we’ve had some really great guests on who’ve been gone into detail on that too. But I think it’s just really an interesting time. There’s a lot of doom out there. There’s a lot of There’s a lot of negativity and, and a lot of fear [00:12:00] too on the timeline. But from, whether it’s crypto or AI or just some of these things where were really scratching our heads, developer’s getting locked up for building open source code a lot of potential threats and impacts that that could bring. seeing some of those things get reversed in the past couple of months has been really interesting. But I’m hopeful. I think this is gonna be, a really interesting year ahead.

Luke: There’s always turbulence. That’s never, and that’s nothing new. Whether it’s in crypto or, or just in tech in general. You know, you’ve always gotta be iterating, you’ve always gotta be adapting. But I think, it is an exciting year that we have ahead and we’re looking to kind of, keep going in this direction with the podcast and, keep going forward with some other fronts too. I mean, I think I did a solo episode around, around bat the basic attention token. We, we released a roadmap in November for Bat Robot 3.0. Kind bringing everything.

Luke: More and more on chain. We made some changes around rewards in QQ three and four last year to help to, remove some technical debt prepare things to scale up, and we’re looking at new ways that we can, [00:13:00] incorporate, integrate that and, and scale up just attention economy. You know, advertising was a really great foot in the door.

Luke: But there’s lots of other ways that we can utilize path. There’s ways that the market has utilized path that we’re, we’re adapting. And in March we actually kicked off our, rewards 3.0 upgrade. So we have a modular offer wall in rewards now, and we kicked off a rewards partner program too, where we’re basically like looking at the field and I mean, this is something I, I think I’ve expressed this on the podcast several times, but with different guests.

Luke: But we’re, coming in from crypto from 2015 originally, but seeing it’s almost, it had been roughly 10 years. The amount of actually usable products is, it’s pretty. Embarrassing that there hasn’t been more. And there’s, looking at what’s been happening with meme coins.

Luke: A, a year ago, we were doing some pilots with some of them, and it was fun. It was community oriented free launch, fair launch kinds of conditions around that stuff. But then you, you see pump fund, which interesting piece of technology, like, I remember. We did a part of a cohort with RGA Venture Studio back in 2019 and 2018 where, one of the [00:14:00] projects we were working with were they, they were trying to make it so that any brand could make a coin.

Luke: and leverage the community element and the ability to add value and associate with the brand and, and do this stuff on chain. there was a lot of excitement and buzz around And, and fast forward to 2024 and you see something like pump fun. Oh, and, and they even see things like opens.

Luke: See, before that right where you could actually mint collections and things like that it’s been getting easier and easier. But now pump fund, they made it thousands and thousands of coins getting launched a day. And there’s definitely a speculative and the bad that comes with that, the one thing that’s gonna be around regardless of, the speculative side of things is, is the ability for a brand or a creator or a. Band or a small business with an existing customer base to go and center their community. Add some value with it around a coin. It’s there now. And I think with some of the, the changes overhead that have happened this year, you can start to see, you know.

Luke: The noise will [00:15:00] calm down, but the technology will stay. And I’m really interested to see where that goes. I’m really interested to see where that goes with AI too. And I think this year’s gonna be a lot about, you know, we saw a lot of scams, a lot of junk and a lot of hype and some shameless hype.

Luke: it is been difficult. But that said the real players play the game, build the, build the tools, build the products. I think there’s never been. Kind of hunger for actual products that people can use in this space than there is now. And there’s some really smart people working on that stuff and, and Braves among them.

Luke: I’m super excited for what we’ve got going on with Bat and with, Brave. I mean, we’ve got one of the biggest holder bases of distributed tokens in, in the world. I mean, we think we’re 14th on Ethereum. As far as most distributed goes uh, it’s pretty exciting. and the ability to.

Luke: Get that cohort excited with some of the things that we’re looking at doing right now is pretty excellent. Whether that’s token gating or payments or really, really leveling up on the attention economy. So keep, keep eyes peel for that. And part of this program that we’ve launched [00:16:00] around the Reward Partner program, you’ve got this beauty of having fungible tokens and we have multi chain support in the browser.

Luke: And so. We could do things with partners that have them field test some different utility plays, see what sticks, see what works. And we built this program to really focus on can we give a cohort of partners enough time, enough exposure, and enough opportunity to try things out across.

Luke: Almost every, every available surface to reach a brave user that we can put you in and be there for them to adapt and also pull that cohort together to try things out together. And so far we’ve got, over 10 partners involved and we probably have 30 or so by the end of the summer.

Luke: there’s a really cool thing around the fungible tokens. they’re out there. Developers can play with them, communities can play with them. We saw this guano coins mean coin. our community, the back community launched on their own. They actually built Guano cave where you can, on Solana, you can go lock up your bat and earn guano like over a certain amount of [00:17:00] time.

Luke: They just did that, it’s awesome. And they, they didn’t limit themselves either. The, the Pudgy Penguins crew, they put together a Pengu coin Memecoin and the guano team supported that too. It’s just really, really cool to see this stuff. I’m really, optimistic for where this is going and where AI is going and there is the Gen X stuff. Seeing things from the browser, seeing how quickly video editing and, and generation the tools available there to iterate has been amazing to see. It’s been really a whirlwind and, and improvements and through, through iterative progress.

Luke: It’s just awesome. And I’m super stoked to see what we. The team comes up with, with Leo and continues to iterate on with search and how that evolves over the, over the months ahead to, yeah, I mean, I think uh, on the privacy front you know, we had folks from Zcash on, we launched a shielded Zcash payments in Brave Wallet, and there’s never been, it’s actually of all the areas I’m concerned about I think that privacy is definitely up there at the top of you, you have a really kind of a pivotal moment right now where, more and more society’s [00:18:00] becoming cashless more and more of what people are doing. Browsing on the web, searching their lives are becoming more and more digital.

Luke: That’s all being tracked and cataloged. And at the same time that we have digital assets that are, are becoming more and more popular it’s not just in the US that we’re seeing regulatory changes. They have MICA regulation in Europe. More and more governments are either looking at. being more friendly towards a broad array of assets or adopting something that looks like a central bank digital currency, which would be pretty dystopian, but governments are seriously looking at this stuff.

Luke: And so. with society becoming more and more cashless the properties of transacting in cash are starting to go away. If we don’t have something to replace those properties, that you’re gonna lose a very important and valuable. You anonymity traits that, that come with analog cash.

Luke: And so it’s one of the reasons why we’re super excited around Zcash. There’s other privacy innovation happening too, all over the place. I think that this year is gonna be more and more focused on privacy too. and so, yeah, there’s lots of noise turbulence, seeing, scams come and [00:19:00] go.

Luke: But I think that there’s never been a hunger for Getting that product market fit getting adoption and, and the tech’s caught up. You can start to do some pretty wild things with, with blockchains now with ai AI’s getting integrated everywhere. So I’m super interested to see where that goes.

Luke: We’re gonna have some guests on, I think you all are gonna enjoy quite a bit too, that we’ll be basically like showing how far the AI has been pushing the limits in a whole range of areas. And yeah, and I think on, on, on that. That note too. I mean, like, there’s some cool updates I think, you know, we want to share with you all too.

Luke: First off everybody listening, I mean, we, rebranded and, and launched a brave technologist in around September of 2023. It’s been really cool. We didn’t know how it was gonna go. One of the things that was really key in doing that was, was launching something that. Was for users.

Luke: And nothing against, B2B or, marketing or whatever. But we are a user first company and having a way to, to bring. Bring the voices, building the tech to people was super cool. And letting people put it in their own terms and getting out to you all has been cool.

Luke: The growth [00:20:00] we’ve seen has been absolutely wild. And the feedback we’ve gotten has been really great too. But we were checking and yeah, since the initial launch of, of both podcasts, the Brave Market and Brave Technologist with the total, there’ve been close to 600,000. Downloads of the episodes whether it’s downloads or, and, episode downloads through the podcast platforms or views on YouTube et cetera.

Luke: It’s been it’s a lot. I mean, like, we haven’t really we’re just making, making shows. And, and what’s also really cool is in, you know, I think the initial podcast launched somewhere around 2021 or so the Brave Marketer. But in the short time. we launched a Brave Technologist.

Luke: We are over 430,000 downloads. Since we’ve rebranded this we’ve 500 million, I mean, 500,000, downloads is in line of sight which is wild. You know, and so I just wanna give, take a second and say, Hey, look thank you all for listening to the podcast. I hope you’re getting getting your time’s worth out of it and I hope that, you know, enjoy it. Once again, I mean, I’m on X Luke, Mo’s on X I’m on on LinkedIn as well, like, [00:21:00] but if there’s ever anything you wanna see, like, semi dm, they’re open. But we’re gonna try to continue bringing interesting guests on.

Luke: I’ve been really blown away by what many people on the team Angelina and Sam, Shez, all them, everybody. And people that just come out, to the podcast like, and, and say, Hey, I would love to come on. we’ve had some amazing guests on this podcast. But we’re gonna keep that going.

Luke: And I think one thing I’m really looking to do in the, the year ahead is keep the focus on the technology, but like, let’s hit some other areas that are interesting and see how AI is impacting, you know, the battle speeds or how, you know, AI and, and. And technology is impacting other types of categories, whether it’s education or health and wellness or family and home and all, or sports or different areas.

Luke: So we’re gonna have a bunch of different guests that are coming from different sectors. And, you know, one other thing that’s been really cool, I mean, the feedback we’ve gotten has been fantastic. Keep it coming. We, listen, I listened every bit of feedback. I take it all in. So, you know, if there’s ever anything you want [00:22:00] to want to see, let me know.

Luke: one other cool piece of feedback we’ve seen has been around brave staff coming on the podcast. And so we’re gonna keep doing that to you. We’ll keep bringing you all more and more members of the team. and more and more check-ins from members of the team that have been on before and some folks you haven’t met yet.

Luke: And so we’re gonna keep bringing you, voices of the people building the products that you’re using with brave and, continue to bring on really cool guests and hit new areas and keep it interesting for you all. So yeah, if there’s ever any topics you wanna see, guests you wanna see, hit me up.

Luke: I’d love to, love to bring ’em on, and the numbers are getting awesome. And yeah, and another personal update too. I’m working on start to construction tomorrow on studio in my house. So, so we’re, start to see a little bit of change up in the background here, but should be pretty rad.

Luke: And I’m looking forward, and maybe we’ll call it the back cave or something. I don’t know. We’ll see. But yeah, I, I think, yeah, doors always open for feedback, whether it’s product whether it’s throughout the podcast whether it’s, you know, just wanna say hi hit me up. Here for you all.

Luke: We’re user first. We, we don’t exist without you. And yeah, thank you all. I’m really humbled [00:23:00] that we’re at almost at 500,000. I said way more than I thought we’d ever be at, at this point. And you know, it doesn’t happen without you all listening every week. So really appreciate it. Let’s see how we can get to a million.

Luke: Yeah, and, and so, you know, that’s, I think you can cover a lot of ground there. Some cool updates from our side. just stay tuned and Like I said, if you want to wanna hit me up, hit me up on X or on LinkedIn, I’d love to hear from you all. And thank you all again for staying tuned in.

Luke: Oh yeah, also too, I think one other cool thing the team back, we did the AI summit, we did some live recordings in New York in December that we released across January. We’re gonna do some more of those this year. So, we will up the game a little bit on that too and get some cool guests on.

Luke: But there’s something about having two people in proximity when you’re doing these interviews. It’s pretty cool. So, we’ll do some of those I think this summer. And, and so stay tuned for that. And yeah, maybe some other live stuff. One other bit too. I’m. Folks that want to get more involved you know, we have our back community calls every Tuesday on Brave Talk.

Luke: If you follow me on X, you’ll see I post a link every week. I also from our base [00:24:00] token account and from the back community account. So, welcome, everybody calls. Welcome open to everybody. We also live stream to X every week. So, stop by there if you want. Every Tuesday, two o’clock Pacific 5:00 PM Eastern.

Luke: And I host that one there too. But we have team updates from the community team and members of the brave staff come on there too. And you know, if door’s open, we want to hear from you more. Let us know where we can improve. Let us know what features you wanna see. Let us know what you want us to us do at bat and, and get involved.

Luke: Love it. Thank you all very much. Looking forward to the rest of 25. Let’s go to a million downloads. Onward. Thanks y’all.

Luke: Thanks for listening to the brave technologist podcast to never miss an episode. Make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the brave browser, you can download it for free today at brave.

Luke: com. And start using Brave Search, which enables you to search the web privately. Brave also shields you from the ads, trackers, and other creepy stuff following you across the web.